Growth in transportation demand causes traffic congestion. The impact of congestion represents inefficient use of fuel and hours of delay. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) using advanced technologies have the potential to increase traffic efficiency of the existing facilities.
Advanced Management Transportation Systems (ATMS) rely on traffic data from different kinds of detectors divided into two categories: intrusive and non-intrusive. One type of intrusive detectors involves inductive loop detectors that are still a common technology for detecting vehicles even if that technology has disadvantages such as lengthy disruption to the traffic flow during installation and maintenance, relatively high cost, high failure rate and inflexibility. Other detectors, like cameras with video processing, also have their limitations and the market is still searching for alternatives to inductive loops.
Information from sensors is the base point in the optimization of traffic management, particularly adaptive timing for traffic light signalling. Well managed adaptive timing can result in reductions of fuel consumption, fewer vehicle emissions and a reduction in waste of time. However, sensor mounting requirements are often costly and cause traffic disruption during installation.